Within the first chapter of the reading Greenberg and Page layout three main benchmarks by which to grade a representative democracy: popular sovereignty, political equality, and political liberty. Popular\u00a0sovereignty is defined varying degrees of the following:<\/p>\n
The book does well to highlight potential issues of majority rule, but does little else to provide specified\u00a0examples of potential shortcomings of\u00a0the\u00a0American representative democracy.\u00a0This post’s intent is to\u00a0point out reasons that America could be considered a poor\u00a0example of a\u00a0representative democracy, specifically concerned with free and fair competitive elections and the people’s participation in the political process through the examination of\u00a0voting trends. Two key points in the text worth noting in this discussion are listed below.<\/p>\n
By these standards, America is weaker than we would like to think. Let me explain before you go up in arms. Able<\/em>\u00a0and capable<\/em>\u00a0have\u00a0two very different meanings.\u00a0To be able<\/em> to vote,\u00a0the Constitution offers that all persons of voting age are eligible to vote\u00a0regardless of race, gender, or age (if over 18+) unless they’re otherwise incapable due to criminal activity\u00a0(criminal activity will be revisited late). Capability<\/a> is however a clear and extreme understanding of the ability. Example: I am able to write, but it is unknown if\u00a0I am capable of writing a “5” blog post.<\/p>\n Beyond what the text already presents, there are three\u00a0issues I have with agreeing that truly free elections exist: relatively low voter participation rates and non-violent\u00a0incarcerated criminals lack voting\u00a0eligibility.\u00a0Feel free to fact check my stats, numbers, calculations, and information. There are periodic hyperlinks throughout my post to support what I present.<\/p>\n Based on\u00a0statistical evidence<\/a>\u00a0compiled on presidential elections, of the past 16 presidential elections the average eligible voter participation\u00a0rate is\u00a063.27%. This is even a lenient average, considering eligible voter participation has not been above 62% since 1976. To simplify the math and accept the reality of America’s two-party system, exclude write in and third party candidates (those that are not Republican or Democratic parties).\u00a0\u00a0“Majority rule” is then simply 1\/2 of the percent of participating voters (on average 31.63%), plus whatever minute amount would give them more than the other party. This means that in reality, on average, we could expect that approximately 32% of the eligible voters are responsible for electing presidents.\u00a0This is quite interesting considering a greater percentage,\u00a0on average, 36.73% are not voting. By this standard, \u00a0the United States\u00a0has issues with the people participating. My question is why is this the case?\u00a0These questions I have further bring into question why people are not voting as well. Are low paid workers\u00a0incapable of voting because they cannot afford\u00a0or are allowed to take\u00a0time from work to vote? Are people incapable of accessing\u00a0transportation to voting locations? Is it\u00a0intentional or not? Are they turned-off by the politicians offerings? Do people simply not care?<\/p>\n 2. \u00a0Non-violent incarcerated persons\u00a0lack voting\u00a0eligibility<\/p>\n Previous stats provided on voter participation don’t take incarcerated people into consideration. Under John Locke’s notion of a “social contract” those persons having been arrested have broken the social contract, and by the Constitution have often forfeit their right to vote. \u00a0There are many understandable reasons as to why this is acceptable: Would you really want a sadistic serial killer weighing in on who the senators will be? Probably not, which is why\u00a0I do consider the Constitution and state laws prohibiting incarcerated persons from voting partially necessary.\u00a0However, non-violent criminals I believe should have as much say, especially considering the direction of present political action. Drug legalization, both in sales and use has been under scrutiny as of late and heavily affect those persons incarcerated. Based on statistics from 2012<\/a>\u00a0sentenced in 2012,\u00a0drug-related offenders \u00a0prisons total ~308,584 people\u00a0and total\u00a0non-violent criminals in both state and federal prison total ~214,100. That means approximately 522,684 non-violent people are ineligible to vote, a number greater than 2014’s\u00a0eligible voting populations<\/a>\u00a0(individually)\u00a0of Alaska, D.C, Vermont, and Wyoming.\u00a0These numbers make me further question our notion of “free” elections.<\/p>\n These two aspects of popular sovereignty are not the only reasons I question America’s strength as a representative democracy, but they do make a decent case for reform in my opinion. Personally, I believe more\u00a0should be done\u00a0to encourage voter participation, perhaps by pushing for mandatory voting like 22 other democracies<\/a>, even if your vote is “I do not like the candidates I have been offered,” “I don’t care,” or “By my personal standard, I am not\u00a0informed enough to vote.” It may create a clearer picture of what American people truly expect of their government. Other pressing issues to popular sovereignty of potentially modern\u00a0versions of\u00a0Jim Crow present in public policy decisions like the closing of DMVs in Alabama’s predominantly black districts<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0the fact the majority of incarcerated are black<\/a>.<\/p>\n I could easily go on, but I’m sure I have provided quite a bit to consider at this point. I look forward to your comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Within the first chapter of the reading Greenberg and Page layout three main benchmarks by which to grade a representative democracy: popular sovereignty, political equality, and political liberty. Popular\u00a0sovereignty is defined varying degrees of the following: Free and fair competitive elections to select government leaders The people’s participation in the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2572,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[288,40530,59091],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-our-unique-experiment","category-fall-2017","column","twocol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2572"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n